Great video. Back in the day when I was happy to spend £1.99 on a budget game by Mastertronic or Firebird because Zzap 64 said Rob Hubbard's music was outstanding, Thatcher's Britain was pumping out 'premium' titles from major publishers who relied upon cheap labour and often you wouldn't even get a title screen, in-game music and/or a completely broken game. I miss riding home on my bike, excited to hear Rob's latest hit - it might have cost more than a 7" single, but if the game was any good, that was a bonus (Spellbound, Soul of a Robot, Warhawk, Chimera and so many others)
I had pinned my mate Paul (RetroB8's comment as we are doing a channel together) but this comment just sums up my childhood and what this channel is about so im gonna pin this
@@markwrightrfNah it’s cool man, Paul has helped me with my channel loads over the last couple of years! Brilliant comment, music is a huge part of my nostalgia and brings back memories better than the games sometimes! For me the excitement of buying a game looking at the screenshots on the way home on the bus and the pure excitement to be absolutely devistetated when loading it up never even seemed to put me off, I did only buy budget games back then though!
There were some shit conversions around, but my biggest gripe is with later systems, namely the SNES, charging £50 per game when the majority of titles were rubbish. Makes a tenner on these shits seem trivial
The only one of these I actually bought was Double Dragon and I distinctly remember opening the box to find a slip of paper with an apology from the programmers for the state of the graphics of the characters. I should have took the hint and just put the lid back on lol
Adding up the number of games by each company: 2:08 Mask 2 (Gremlin) 2:53 Red Heat (Ocean) 3:38 Human Killing Machine (US Gold) 4:23 Vigilante (US Gold) 5:07 Street Fighter 2 (US Gold) 5:53 Karnov (Activision) 6:36 Chase HQ (Ocean) 7:21 Double Dragon (Melbourne House) 8:06 Guerrilla War (Ocean) 8:51 Street Fighter (Go!/US Gold) 9:35 WEC Le Mans (Imagine/Ocean) 10:20 After Burner (Activision) 11:04 G-LOC (US Gold) 11:49 Big Trouble in Little China (Electric Dreams/Activision) 12:34 Crazy Cars (Titus) 13:18 Knight Rider (Ocean) 14:02 Line of Fire (US Gold) 14:47 Cisco Heat (Imageworks) 15:32 Highlander (Ocean) 16:16 Dick Tracy (Titus) And the total number of games for each company churning out this garbage: 1st equal: US Gold and Ocean (6 games each) 3rd: Activision (3 games) 4th: Titus (2 games) 5th equal: Gremlin, Melbourne House and Imageworks (1 game each) Hard Drivin' was lucky not to make this list, that's for sure! US Gold really seemed to be happy to release complete rubbish and never think of the kids buying this stuff. No wonder many people turned to piracy. Who'd want to buy a full-price game after being burnt buying anything on this list?
I was quite lucky when I was a kid, as i had a small independent shop near me that offered a great deal. Buy a full price game £8.99p and if you didn't like it he would exchange for another £8.99p game for an extra £1.
@@JonasRosenven wasnt really an apology for the game though was it, it was apologising for the small gap at the characters waists ... a compromise they say to give us the game we wanted.... erm no ....
A Team was technically homebrew, and not a licensed game. It was only sold via mail order, never in stores. It was made by a notorious Dutch piracy group. Most of their games were ripoffs/modified versions of type-in games
@@theyamo7219 Is the A-Team the one that's a crappy Space Invaders knock-off where you shoot the A-Team members' floating heads? I only played that on an emulator, and was very surprised when I heard someone online say that it was a licensed retail game. Your explanation makes a lot more sense.
So so so many unfinished "tech demos" by coders who had just moved form basic to ASM on this list. I don't blame the coders, I blame the marketing execs for taking unfinished, unoptimized code and throwing licensed on them for quick bucks. Fantastic video as always, OSG!
I think that Street Fighter II would be difficult to reproduce even just the gameplay with just one fire button on the 🕹 joystick because how do you do a kick if the fire button is punch? Maybe press fire and point the stick down.
This is why two tape decks and a c120 with tape counter settings on it ruled. If it was worth it we'd buy it other than that rented from the local shop and distributed throughout school.
Gazza's Super Soccer. The back of the box listed a load of features that just didn't even exist, I assume they did in the 16-bit versions that they also showed in the box pics.
To be fair, most soccer/footy games on the C64 were dire. Other than Keith Von Eron's Pro Soccer (Microprose Soccer to you guys), Commodore's own International Soccer, and Emylyn Hughes International Soccer, I cannot name any other game that I consider good, most of the others were either mediocre, or outright shit.
Thankfully the only ones I had here were Double Dragon, Cisco Heat and Street Fighter 2. Funnily enough, I had the SNES version of Street Fighter 2 before getting the C64 one… not sure what I was thinking!
I had Double Dragon on budget, thankfully. But yeah, I was another one of those morons that rushed out and bought Street Fighter 2 after playing it in the arcades and on my mates SNES.
I cant believe you managed to persuade Patrick Moore to rise from the grave for this video. What a legend he was. I think street fighter was the worst game I bought on commodore but as you said, still bloody played it. Pretty sure the version i played looked very different tho! Also had double dragon but having nothing to compare it to, I didn't hate it but certainly didn't play it much
I loved the good old days of popping into Boots and picking up a Commodore 64 game for £3.99! Had so many classics, but i never owned Street Fighter, i never knew it was on th C64 until watching this 😅 Great content as always.👍🏻
I feel bad because I coerced my brother into buying G-LOC on the C64 because I’d played it in an arcade at Birmingham International. I felt so bad about it I gave him the money back. But he enjoyed it.
God, you've opened up some wounds with this one! Even now when me and my ZX spectrum friends banter about who's system was better. Chase HQ and Hard drivin get rubbed in my face every time!
Well when they're rubbing your face in it over those games, you can always remind them that the spectrum had the game EastEnders, after the soap opera and it was the worst game ever.
Just show them Buggy Boy!, the C64 version was brilliant while Spectrum and Amstrad was like Chase HQ on the C64, back when coin-op conversations were close to perfect on the system. I have a Spectrum emulator on my PC now, really glad I downloaded it and got the better Chase HQ.
The Spectrum version of Hard Drivin isn't that good either, in my opinion. IMHO the only good home port of Hard Drivin' is the MegaDrive/Genesis version.
I had roughly half these games and I agree with you completely but, after loading up afterburner on Christmas day and seeing how terrible it was is probably what set me on the path to being such a miserable sod today!
Looking forward to seeing you guys start up your new channel, I would have been well pissed off with some of those games bitd if I had dropped all my money into them Great video mate 👍
I still remember admiring screen captures of Shadow Warrior at the store and then being disappointed at home when game didn't look anything like it on my C64 and I thought that my game was faulty
Noticed most of these games were dated 88/89 time, looks like the 64 port was an afterthought as evrybody was turning to the new 16bit era of computers. But i must admit i still collect these from computer fairs and on ebay just for the nostalgia.
I have one for the ages. Magic Johnson's Basketball by Melbourne House. A utter crapfest of a basketball game where you could score by rolling the basketball under the hoop, steal the ball before the opponent could make an in-bounds pass and score again. The three point shooting percentage was way too high (I'd say around 70%). I think I paid $9.99 for that pile of garbage. I can't imagine it being released outside of the USA, so I understand why it's not here. It wasn't magic, it was tragic. Otherwise, I remember owning one or two games that made this list. Yikes. Cisco Heat looked like it was programmed as a flip book animation rather than a video game.
Sounds just like Magic Johnsons Fast Break for the NES. A game I got for only $5 new at Shopko when the 16-Bit era was just exploding. It had all the same exact problems you explained. Yeah the 3 pointers almost always went in. No dunking, no special moves. The graphics were extremely basic. Atari Basketball destroys it!
@@AngryCalvin I played it again in a C64 emulator yesterday and recorded the footage on RUclips. The C64 version would be appropriate for Mystery Science Theater 3000 if they did video gameplay instead of movies.
I sold my C64 in 1986 and so didn't know about many of these games. Pre 86 US Gold were a major quality label... sorry to see they went south pretty quickly...
The fact that Human Killing Machine was advertised as a followup to Street Fighter 1 on home computers is just insulting, as the first Street Fighter was already lame to begin with.
Great! this brings back memories. The untouchables, The last ninja, Bruce lee were amongst my favourites but I had a lot of crap games too. I liked the music in the games.
As a kid I learned pretty quick that nearly any NES game licensed from a tv / movie franchise was going to be complete garbage. Xmen is a great example....FOOL ME ONCE LJN!!!
I rarely bough full price. I was a code masters or master tropic kid usually. One of the few full price Ocean games I bought was Untouchables. Didnt enjoy that. Especially at £9.99. I had Double Dragon on compilation with Dynamite Dux. Both suckeD. The PC version of Street fighter was as bad as the C64 version. I never had crazy cars on C64 but enjoyed crazy cars II on PC. That was a good driving game. Real sense of speed.
When you look at this stuff and the relative inflation, it seems that games have always been a luxury item. Its only the huge second hand market (which digital is really killing) that kept a lid on prices.
Does anyone know of a C64 horror themed space game where you're on a space ship fighting aliens, and on the box it advertised something like "movie style scenes" or something to that effect? I remember seeing it at Babbage's back in I think the early 1990's, but wound up buying something else instead. I went back later to find it but it was no longer in stock. I've been trying to find it ever since!
I remember being so hyped for Double Dragon that I spent my birthday $ on. After waiting 20 minutes for the game to load up, I was deflated when I saw what actually loaded up. God help you if you died and had to wait another 5 minutes for the game to restart.
Sadly, I had some of these :(. Fortunately I only paid for HKM (utter crap), and my copies of Chase HQ, Vigilante and Afterburner were just that - copies lol. Kudos goes to Commodore Format for their review of Cisco Heat which totally put me off buying it :)
That's one of the few times Commodore Format actually posted an accurate and honest review, I think they scored Cisco Heat 8%, Commodore Format was biggest culprit out of all the review magazines for giving favourable scores to poor and mediocre games
One of the first Atari ST games I purchased, sight unseen, here in the USA was an Import of Street Fighter. I excitedly drove back home, booted it up and never played it again. What a huge disappointment.
I remember seeing the screenshots for SF 2 in Commodore Format at the time and I knew it was going to terrible because they just used the standard C64 char set for the text
Highlander - I had a cracked copy of this, but I couldn't play it properly, because as I recall, the cracking group cracked each level as a separate program. I forget the details because it's been close to 40 years, but I distinctly remember there being more than one part to this. Maybe the original was that way too? I have no idea. I seem to recall that there was at least one other game where they cracked it into two parts that you had to load separately.
Only one of these i owned was SFII, which i got from a boot sale, must have been in 94 ish when i owned a SNES, but still played c64 a bit. I put a good chunk of time into it, even though it was crap.
Eager to watch this video. I remember some games that were $40 and I couldn't beat the first 2 of like 16 missions. Then there was Ikari Warriors which was like $45 and like 15 minutes long... I couldn't return it fast enough after beating it a second time thinking I needed to unlock more levels??
We had Street Fighter 2. The long loading was also a big problem. But I didn't hate it as a kid. We had Karnov too. Pfff, sooo hard and boring. Really bad. We also had Double Dragon. But I liked that one at the time, but I can see what you mean with the walking back and forth. Aah and Line if Fire. The box looked sooo cool. The arcade is cool, but this version is just disappointing. It had trouble loading for us too.
There was an alternate version of street fighter 1 which was not bad at all. You had the fireball, dragon punch & spinning kick super moves. It came on the other side of the disk as the crap version in Australia. Double dragon was a massive disappointment as a kid. I think double dragon 2 was an improvement though...
Owned several of these to my shame . I rem getting Street Fighter 2 and playing Blanka and spamming electricity, then having to lie down coz my eyes hurt so much!
Luckily I only had afterburner on this list, although I wasn`t that lucky, the game was crap from start to never reached end. No skill involved, just random joystick rotation. The box art was EXCELLENT!
I have some nostalgic feelings for the Double Dragon C64 port! But you know a game is bad when the developers can't figure out how to make characters without a gap between sprites, and they put a lame excuse for this in the manual!
I really think Bomb Jack should have been on the list. The game was fantastic in the arcade. It was good on the Spectrum. But the C64 version ruined the gameplay completely by having bigger sprites so you couldn't fly above the enemies (see Stage 1)
When the C64 version of Street Fighter 2 was first announced many people thought it wouldn't be possible...........they were right. The Big Trouble In Little China game was equally as tragic, a total tragedy. For all those affected by those terrible games - help is out there, therapists can fix us. The pain of the bad memories can be removed and replaced with happy memories.
The nostalgia. Never a major C64 gamer, always had Speccys. I and my mates were fortunate enough to have a small game store near our school, and they would have games loaded all the time, and would often load whatever you asked. They did get a fair bit of our pocket money, or paper round money as a result. But I do remember being thankful for them letting us play dogshit games so we could avoid them, and also showing us the good stuff. Chase HQ on the Speccy + was decent, Target Renegade a flipping masterpiece, but yeah the film licensees burnt a lot of kids and it's a shame because we all know these software houses were more than capable of producing great games.
I'll own up. I bought Street Fighter 2 based on my experiences with the Coin op and fantastic SNES port. I did a 'Shut up and take my money' job before It even had a review. Talk about buyers regret.
RE: Chase HQ, I was so disappointed after playing it loads in the arcades all while my Speecy and Amstrad mates had it and kept saying how great it was. They soon knew how I felt after they played Buggy Boy round my house, bought it for their Spectrum and Amstrads and got a slow sluggish piece of crap, unlike the fast and fluid game I had.
He especially doesn't like crappy driving games. :) I admire some of the effort behind them as getting a good driving game on the C64 is very hard but I have to agree those were baaad.
I feel lucky that I didn't have the bad luck to have bought the vast majority of these travesties or even played the pirated versions! I was always carefull with my hard earned dosh back then, I read multiple reviews before I parted with my cash for a new game, like you said a full price tape was a lot back then! These are all shite, it was mad how the software houses had the balls to release this kak. Hope it was as fun for you to make as it was for us to watch ;)
There is an ocean release of double.dragon. Is this one the one released be mastertronic? I guess a budget re release of the melborne house one? The ocean one wasnt great but was better than the one on here and at least has the right music.
Magazine reviews were a thing you know. I got a Speccy+2 for Christmas 1986 and the first game I bought was Dragons Lair. It had pictures from the arcade game on the back and me being a young idiot didn't know any better. I learned quick though. Generally if a game was based on a license it would be crap.
Even magazine reviews were not perfect, they gave Street Fighter a positive score (albeit it was the US version, which was slightly better) that they reviewed.
There's a couple I would disagree with, but then I guess that's me justifying the time I put into them. The interesting bit about Street Fighter is that US Gold put the UK version (developed by Tiertex) and the US version (Capcom USA) onto the same tape/disk. They took different approaches - Tiertex went for big, blocky graphics and scrolling backgrounds, whereas Capcom USA used overlaid sprites to give more detail and had narrower, smaller background strips. Both are flawed in terms of gameplay, but I marginally prefer the US version. Indeed, I have been thinking a lot about bad games recently as I have been writing a new book - C64 NIGHTMARES, for Fusion Retro Books, as a follow-up to Graeme Mason's ZX NIGHTMARES released last year. That's over 100 terrible C64 games (split into Loathsome Licenses, They Did What, Patience of a Saint, and Simply Awful chapters). Coming soon!
The TMNT game was based on the first TMNT game on the NES, not the arcade game. I bought this one when I was a kid and thought it was OK. That is until at a certain point the game froze making it impossible to beat.
I had hundreds of games, most of those mentioned here... But only paid for one... Nz story... The red cartridge add on was worth its weight in gold, allowed seemless easy copying and cracked all pass codes.
Hmmm....what is surprising is Karnov, Guerilla War, Double Dragon and Vigilante all looked/played like pure garbage. All four games looked phenomenal and played well on the Nes/Master System. I'm also wondering if this was a budget thing? Were these games bad because the publishers went super cheap? I'm guessing that I am dead on the money, and here's why I say this... you show the prices for these games as 12.99 pounds. That's ridiculously cheap compared to what we paid for games. Budget titles started at $29.96, with full priced ones hitting between $49.96 to $69.96 American. I got my Nes and Master System in 1986, so I was definitely gaming during this time. Cool video. Addendum- Holy sh*t is that scaling on the C64 (Line of Fire)?! No way! The game might be terrible but that effect is eye-opening for the time. Wow.
Yea you're right, in the old days you brought that game with the cool box art, it sucked and you were stuck playing it. I remember my C64, not sure I ever bought a game. I had a buttload of floppys with all sorts of pirated or bootleged games, random programs and other weird crap. Everyone just copied them than passed them around
Same here, I had a foreign mate with a add on cartridge that allowed copying of all games and access pass codes for extras.... He had friends overseas and we shared hundreds of games for the cost of the floppy disks.
I had Red Heat, Knight Rider and Big Trouble... and man, were they bad! We should've been paid for playing them! Fortunately back then, I had them for free so no regrets.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
Great video. Back in the day when I was happy to spend £1.99 on a budget game by Mastertronic or Firebird because Zzap 64 said Rob Hubbard's music was outstanding, Thatcher's Britain was pumping out 'premium' titles from major publishers who relied upon cheap labour and often you wouldn't even get a title screen, in-game music and/or a completely broken game. I miss riding home on my bike, excited to hear Rob's latest hit - it might have cost more than a 7" single, but if the game was any good, that was a bonus (Spellbound, Soul of a Robot, Warhawk, Chimera and so many others)
I had pinned my mate Paul (RetroB8's comment as we are doing a channel together) but this comment just sums up my childhood and what this channel is about so im gonna pin this
@@oldstylegaming Don't be daft, give your mate a leg up, we're all in the same boat 🙂
@@markwrightrf he wont mind
@@markwrightrfNah it’s cool man, Paul has helped me with my channel loads over the last couple of years!
Brilliant comment, music is a huge part of my nostalgia and brings back memories better than the games sometimes!
For me the excitement of buying a game looking at the screenshots on the way home on the bus and the pure excitement to be absolutely devistetated when loading it up never even seemed to put me off, I did only buy budget games back then though!
There were some shit conversions around, but my biggest gripe is with later systems, namely the SNES, charging £50 per game when the majority of titles were rubbish. Makes a tenner on these shits seem trivial
The only one of these I actually bought was Double Dragon and I distinctly remember opening the box to find a slip of paper with an apology from the programmers for the state of the graphics of the characters. I should have took the hint and just put the lid back on lol
Adding up the number of games by each company:
2:08 Mask 2 (Gremlin)
2:53 Red Heat (Ocean)
3:38 Human Killing Machine (US Gold)
4:23 Vigilante (US Gold)
5:07 Street Fighter 2 (US Gold)
5:53 Karnov (Activision)
6:36 Chase HQ (Ocean)
7:21 Double Dragon (Melbourne House)
8:06 Guerrilla War (Ocean)
8:51 Street Fighter (Go!/US Gold)
9:35 WEC Le Mans (Imagine/Ocean)
10:20 After Burner (Activision)
11:04 G-LOC (US Gold)
11:49 Big Trouble in Little China (Electric Dreams/Activision)
12:34 Crazy Cars (Titus)
13:18 Knight Rider (Ocean)
14:02 Line of Fire (US Gold)
14:47 Cisco Heat (Imageworks)
15:32 Highlander (Ocean)
16:16 Dick Tracy (Titus)
And the total number of games for each company churning out this garbage:
1st equal: US Gold and Ocean (6 games each)
3rd: Activision (3 games)
4th: Titus (2 games)
5th equal: Gremlin, Melbourne House and Imageworks (1 game each)
Hard Drivin' was lucky not to make this list, that's for sure! US Gold really seemed to be happy to release complete rubbish and never think of the kids buying this stuff. No wonder many people turned to piracy. Who'd want to buy a full-price game after being burnt buying anything on this list?
I was quite lucky when I was a kid, as i had a small independent shop near me that offered a great deal. Buy a full price game £8.99p and if you didn't like it he would exchange for another £8.99p game for an extra £1.
That would have been a great idea mate, id have took loads back
@@oldstylegaming I did mate but not before putting it through the Midi twin deck. 😉😉😉.
Anyone remember Cobra, the Stallone movie game from Ocean? Holy crap, was that a bad game!
Cobra could have definitely been on this list, it was £8.95 and a total pile of crap
I had COBRA for my CPC in a Compilation... And yeah, it was Shite! Yet shockingly, I did play it a lot...
The Spectrum game was pretty good, all other versions were dire though
Oh don't remind me... you couldn't complete it because they ran out of time so just looped the levels!
bad but I played the living shit out of that. I dunno, I really liked the weapons for some reason.
System 3's Turbocharge was what the C64 Chase HQ port should have been
In fairness to Afterburner, you didn't actually do much in the arcade cabinet either
Listening to your Knight Rider footage, I suddenly thought “Oh, the kettle’s boiling!”
Haha
I still cant sit down properly after Double Dragon and its been about 35 years. And now you had to go and remind me?! :D Love your content mate ;)
Thanks mate, i try to do subjects a little bit different
@@JonasRosenven wasnt really an apology for the game though was it, it was apologising for the small gap at the characters waists ... a compromise they say to give us the game we wanted.... erm no ....
@@JonasRosenven I remember that.. even as a kid I realised something about this was just plain wrong.. and boy, it hurt.
Absolutely can’t wait to start our stream mate, it’s gonna be a blast!!
Great video as always mate
Me too mate :-)
Surprised to not see Hard Drivin' or The A Team on here - they were absolutely terrible full price games on the C64
A Team was technically homebrew, and not a licensed game. It was only sold via mail order, never in stores. It was made by a notorious Dutch piracy group. Most of their games were ripoffs/modified versions of type-in games
@@theyamo7219 Is the A-Team the one that's a crappy Space Invaders knock-off where you shoot the A-Team members' floating heads? I only played that on an emulator, and was very surprised when I heard someone online say that it was a licensed retail game. Your explanation makes a lot more sense.
I bought Street Fighter 2 on release, thinking it was guaranteed to be incredible :(
Yeah ...me too, what a mess
So did i 😂
@@zigzagtoes I'm guilty too. 😆😆
One button street fighter 2.... I can only imagine.... LOL
So so so many unfinished "tech demos" by coders who had just moved form basic to ASM on this list. I don't blame the coders, I blame the marketing execs for taking unfinished, unoptimized code and throwing licensed on them for quick bucks. Fantastic video as always, OSG!
Calling them tech demos is an insult to actual tech demos. The Amiga got its fair share of those as well, though.
I think that Street Fighter II would be difficult to reproduce even just the gameplay with just one fire button on the 🕹 joystick because how do you do a kick if the fire button is punch? Maybe press fire and point the stick down.
They managed to squeeze all the moves into Mortal Kombat on the Amiga with one button
With Human Killing Machine so low on the list knew we were in for a real treat. Great list and video happy I found this channel.
Love your videos OSG, keep up the good work. Looking forward to your new channel collaboration!
Thanks mate
This is why two tape decks and a c120 with tape counter settings on it ruled. If it was worth it we'd buy it other than that rented from the local shop and distributed throughout school.
Gazza's Super Soccer. The back of the box listed a load of features that just didn't even exist, I assume they did in the 16-bit versions that they also showed in the box pics.
To be fair, most soccer/footy games on the C64 were dire. Other than Keith Von Eron's Pro Soccer (Microprose Soccer to you guys), Commodore's own International Soccer, and Emylyn Hughes International Soccer, I cannot name any other game that I consider good, most of the others were either mediocre, or outright shit.
Worth watching for the immortal comment "Activision bastards!"..... Subbed.
Thankfully the only ones I had here were Double Dragon, Cisco Heat and Street Fighter 2. Funnily enough, I had the SNES version of Street Fighter 2 before getting the C64 one… not sure what I was thinking!
I had Double Dragon on budget, thankfully. But yeah, I was another one of those morons that rushed out and bought Street Fighter 2 after playing it in the arcades and on my mates SNES.
you still had the Snes when you bought it?
Same here, I had it on Megadrive also!
I had Karnov. That was the only one I had that I actually bought. I did play the others, but thankfully, I had them on copy
I didn’t mind the lack of BGM on Karnov. Thought it gave the game an eerie atmosphere
I can't think for the life of me, what the back ground music is in your intro, I think Simply Austin used it too!!
I cant believe you managed to persuade Patrick Moore to rise from the grave for this video. What a legend he was. I think street fighter was the worst game I bought on commodore but as you said, still bloody played it. Pretty sure the version i played looked very different tho! Also had double dragon but having nothing to compare it to, I didn't hate it but certainly didn't play it much
SHADOWFAX was the worst one I had. You rode a white horse and shot black ones. That was it.
I loved the good old days of popping into Boots and picking up a Commodore 64 game for £3.99! Had so many classics, but i never owned Street Fighter, i never knew it was on th C64 until watching this 😅
Great content as always.👍🏻
I feel bad because I coerced my brother into buying G-LOC on the C64 because I’d played it in an arcade at Birmingham International.
I felt so bad about it I gave him the money back. But he enjoyed it.
God, you've opened up some wounds with this one! Even now when me and my ZX spectrum friends banter about who's system was better. Chase HQ and Hard drivin get rubbed in my face every time!
I know mate...but I always just think we got way better games as a whole ....
Well when they're rubbing your face in it over those games, you can always remind them that the spectrum had the game EastEnders, after the soap opera and it was the worst game ever.
Just show them Buggy Boy!, the C64 version was brilliant while Spectrum and Amstrad was like Chase HQ on the C64, back when coin-op conversations were close to perfect on the system. I have a Spectrum emulator on my PC now, really glad I downloaded it and got the better Chase HQ.
@@chrish6734 Worse than Sqij?
The Spectrum version of Hard Drivin isn't that good either, in my opinion. IMHO the only good home port of Hard Drivin' is the MegaDrive/Genesis version.
Oi oi OSG, another great video and you got the great Gamesmaster to talk fron beyond the grave
I miss Patrick as the Gamesmaster
I had roughly half these games and I agree with you completely but, after loading up afterburner on Christmas day and seeing how terrible it was is probably what set me on the path to being such a miserable sod today!
hahahahahahahahha
Looking forward to seeing you guys start up your new channel, I would have been well pissed off with some of those games bitd if I had dropped all my money into them
Great video mate 👍
Double Dragon actually had two ports on the C64, and both were pants
I still remember admiring screen captures of Shadow Warrior at the store and then being disappointed at home when game didn't look anything like it on my C64 and I thought that my game was faulty
Noticed most of these games were dated 88/89 time, looks like the 64 port was an afterthought as evrybody was turning to the new 16bit era of computers. But i must admit i still collect these from computer fairs and on ebay just for the nostalgia.
I have one for the ages. Magic Johnson's Basketball by Melbourne House. A utter crapfest of a basketball game where you could score by rolling the basketball under the hoop, steal the ball before the opponent could make an in-bounds pass and score again. The three point shooting percentage was way too high (I'd say around 70%).
I think I paid $9.99 for that pile of garbage. I can't imagine it being released outside of the USA, so I understand why it's not here. It wasn't magic, it was tragic.
Otherwise, I remember owning one or two games that made this list. Yikes.
Cisco Heat looked like it was programmed as a flip book animation rather than a video game.
MJ’s Basketball was actually a pretty good game on the Amiga.
Sounds just like Magic Johnsons Fast Break for the NES. A game I got for only $5 new at Shopko when the 16-Bit era was just exploding. It had all the same exact problems you explained. Yeah the 3 pointers almost always went in. No dunking, no special moves. The graphics were extremely basic. Atari Basketball destroys it!
@@bradallen8909 If I recall correctly, the arcade game was created on the Amiga, so no surprise there.
@@AngryCalvin I played it again in a C64 emulator yesterday and recorded the footage on RUclips. The C64 version would be appropriate for Mystery Science Theater 3000 if they did video gameplay instead of movies.
I sold my C64 in 1986 and so didn't know about many of these games. Pre 86 US Gold were a major quality label... sorry to see they went south pretty quickly...
Good to hear from you mate.
The fact that Human Killing Machine was advertised as a followup to Street Fighter 1 on home computers is just insulting, as the first Street Fighter was already lame to begin with.
As bad as C64 Street Fighter was, the Amiga version pissed me off more, because there was no excuse for that version to be as bad as it was.
Great! this brings back memories. The untouchables, The last ninja, Bruce lee were amongst my favourites but I had a lot of crap games too. I liked the music in the games.
As a kid I learned pretty quick that nearly any NES game licensed from a tv / movie franchise was going to be complete garbage. Xmen is a great example....FOOL ME ONCE LJN!!!
I rarely bough full price. I was a code masters or master tropic kid usually. One of the few full price Ocean games I bought was Untouchables. Didnt enjoy that. Especially at £9.99. I had Double Dragon on compilation with Dynamite Dux. Both suckeD. The PC version of Street fighter was as bad as the C64 version. I never had crazy cars on C64 but enjoyed crazy cars II on PC. That was a good driving game. Real sense of speed.
When you look at this stuff and the relative inflation, it seems that games have always been a luxury item. Its only the huge second hand market (which digital is really killing) that kept a lid on prices.
I’m still scarred by full price Final Fight 😢
Ah the memories. Bought a few of these on this list, the most memorable being Knight Rider. God I was wounded....
great, funny, priceless. well done, my friend!
Does anyone know of a C64 horror themed space game where you're on a space ship fighting aliens, and on the box it advertised something like "movie style scenes" or something to that effect? I remember seeing it at Babbage's back in I think the early 1990's, but wound up buying something else instead. I went back later to find it but it was no longer in stock. I've been trying to find it ever since!
Project Firestart?
@@oldstylegaming what a amazing game
Anyone remember the Hollywood pack? I got that for xmas around '88 or something. It had Platoon, Rambo & Miami Vice if memory serves
U brought back the memories of spending paper round money on x64 games i however drew a short straw and ended up with a c16
If by the time the Amiga is out you're not checking reviews of the c64 version before buying a game then frankly you only have yourself to blame.
Operation Wolf 😢😮 remember buying it from WH Snith for my Birthday,wow it was bad
Thanks for sharing. DD did it for me: what in the heck was that transparent line along the waist of all the fighters? It screamed beta release.
That'd be their sprite multiplexer. 2 sprites stacked vertically but not cleanly touching each other to give the illusion of one object.
Cheers. It looked so sloppy.
'Jailbreak', the Konami arcade game. I bought it on the C64 for £9.99. Almost 30 years later, I'm still bloody furious.
I had Cisco Heat😂
No idea how to stop at the stop signs
Great vid mate
Amazing video thanks!
I remember being so hyped for Double Dragon that I spent my birthday $ on. After waiting 20 minutes for the game to load up, I was deflated when I saw what actually loaded up. God help you if you died and had to wait another 5 minutes for the game to restart.
I had a c64 when I was a kid and it 50/50 when you bought a new game if you could even get it to load/work.
Sadly, I had some of these :(. Fortunately I only paid for HKM (utter crap), and my copies of Chase HQ, Vigilante and Afterburner were just that - copies lol. Kudos goes to Commodore Format for their review of Cisco Heat which totally put me off buying it :)
Zzap only gave it 30% too...i honestly dont know why anyone bought that game
The Arcade game was a pile of crap too.
That's one of the few times Commodore Format actually posted an accurate and honest review, I think they scored Cisco Heat 8%, Commodore Format was biggest culprit out of all the review magazines for giving favourable scores to poor and mediocre games
@@ravengaming2597 I wouldn't call it crap, but it was kind of mid. It was basically a crap conversion of a pretty meh game to begin with
I'm surprised people were releasing things for the C64 in 1989 and beyond.
Knight Rider mentioned. But yes, they gotta make better Knight Rider games.
Red Heat is absolutely the worst use of an IP ever.
Great stuff as always.
One of the first Atari ST games I purchased, sight unseen, here in the USA was an Import of Street Fighter. I excitedly drove back home, booted it up and never played it again. What a huge disappointment.
I didnt't even know there was a Street Fighter 2 version for C64
I remember seeing the screenshots for SF 2 in Commodore Format at the time and I knew it was going to terrible because they just used the standard C64 char set for the text
Highlander - I had a cracked copy of this, but I couldn't play it properly, because as I recall, the cracking group cracked each level as a separate program. I forget the details because it's been close to 40 years, but I distinctly remember there being more than one part to this. Maybe the original was that way too? I have no idea. I seem to recall that there was at least one other game where they cracked it into two parts that you had to load separately.
Amusing! Enjoyed that, fortunately I didn't play any of these let alone buy them!
Only one of these i owned was SFII, which i got from a boot sale, must have been in 94 ish when i owned a SNES, but still played c64 a bit. I put a good chunk of time into it, even though it was crap.
How on earth did you do that patrick moore video.
Eager to watch this video. I remember some games that were $40 and I couldn't beat the first 2 of like 16 missions. Then there was Ikari Warriors which was like $45 and like 15 minutes long... I couldn't return it fast enough after beating it a second time thinking I needed to unlock more levels??
We had Street Fighter 2. The long loading was also a big problem. But I didn't hate it as a kid. We had Karnov too. Pfff, sooo hard and boring. Really bad. We also had Double Dragon. But I liked that one at the time, but I can see what you mean with the walking back and forth. Aah and Line if Fire. The box looked sooo cool. The arcade is cool, but this version is just disappointing. It had trouble loading for us too.
There was an alternate version of street fighter 1 which was not bad at all. You had the fireball, dragon punch & spinning kick super moves. It came on the other side of the disk as the crap version in Australia. Double dragon was a massive disappointment as a kid. I think double dragon 2 was an improvement though...
Owned several of these to my shame . I rem getting Street Fighter 2 and playing Blanka and spamming electricity, then having to lie down coz my eyes hurt so much!
Vigilante appears to be a Turkish Action Movie simulator 😂
thats not counting the games on Cart mate, though those only dropped if there was a sale at the shops or something like that
Luckily I only had afterburner on this list, although I wasn`t that lucky, the game was crap from start to never reached end. No skill involved, just random joystick rotation. The box art was EXCELLENT!
I have some nostalgic feelings for the Double Dragon C64 port! But you know a game is bad when the developers can't figure out how to make characters without a gap between sprites, and they put a lame excuse for this in the manual!
I really think Bomb Jack should have been on the list.
The game was fantastic in the arcade. It was good on the Spectrum.
But the C64 version ruined the gameplay completely by having bigger sprites so you couldn't fly above the enemies (see Stage 1)
When the C64 version of Street Fighter 2 was first announced many people thought it wouldn't be possible...........they were right. The Big Trouble In Little China game was equally as tragic, a total tragedy. For all those affected by those terrible games - help is out there, therapists can fix us. The pain of the bad memories can be removed and replaced with happy memories.
Golden Axe on the C64 was pretty crap too in all fairness, apart from the music.
The nostalgia. Never a major C64 gamer, always had Speccys.
I and my mates were fortunate enough to have a small game store near our school, and they would have games loaded all the time, and would often load whatever you asked. They did get a fair bit of our pocket money, or paper round money as a result.
But I do remember being thankful for them letting us play dogshit games so we could avoid them, and also showing us the good stuff.
Chase HQ on the Speccy + was decent, Target Renegade a flipping masterpiece, but yeah the film licensees burnt a lot of kids and it's a shame because we all know these software houses were more than capable of producing great games.
I'll own up. I bought Street Fighter 2 based on my experiences with the Coin op and fantastic SNES port. I did a 'Shut up and take my money' job before It even had a review. Talk about buyers regret.
RE: Chase HQ, I was so disappointed after playing it loads in the arcades all while my Speecy and Amstrad mates had it and kept saying how great it was.
They soon knew how I felt after they played Buggy Boy round my house, bought it for their Spectrum and Amstrads and got a slow sluggish piece of crap, unlike the fast and fluid game I had.
I remember being furious at playing Double Dragon on my C64. Absolute tosh!
Luckily, Double Dragon 2 was a pretty decent port.
Damn. Before the video I thought that Dick Tracy must be in top 3. I bought the game and after 30 years I'm still amazed how bad it was.
The enemies have gone on strike 😂😂😂 im dead
He especially doesn't like crappy driving games. :) I admire some of the effort behind them as getting a good driving game on the C64 is very hard but I have to agree those were baaad.
Brilliant list but! Where was yie At king fu 2?
I feel lucky that I didn't have the bad luck to have bought the vast majority of these travesties or even played the pirated versions! I was always carefull with my hard earned dosh back then, I read multiple reviews before I parted with my cash for a new game, like you said a full price tape was a lot back then! These are all shite, it was mad how the software houses had the balls to release this kak. Hope it was as fun for you to make as it was for us to watch ;)
There is an ocean release of double.dragon. Is this one the one released be mastertronic? I guess a budget re release of the melborne house one? The ocean one wasnt great but was better than the one on here and at least has the right music.
Magazine reviews were a thing you know. I got a Speccy+2 for Christmas 1986 and the first game I bought was Dragons Lair. It had pictures from the arcade game on the back and me being a young idiot didn't know any better. I learned quick though. Generally if a game was based on a license it would be crap.
Even magazine reviews were not perfect, they gave Street Fighter a positive score (albeit it was the US version, which was slightly better) that they reviewed.
There's a couple I would disagree with, but then I guess that's me justifying the time I put into them. The interesting bit about Street Fighter is that US Gold put the UK version (developed by Tiertex) and the US version (Capcom USA) onto the same tape/disk. They took different approaches - Tiertex went for big, blocky graphics and scrolling backgrounds, whereas Capcom USA used overlaid sprites to give more detail and had narrower, smaller background strips. Both are flawed in terms of gameplay, but I marginally prefer the US version.
Indeed, I have been thinking a lot about bad games recently as I have been writing a new book - C64 NIGHTMARES, for Fusion Retro Books, as a follow-up to Graeme Mason's ZX NIGHTMARES released last year. That's over 100 terrible C64 games (split into Loathsome Licenses, They Did What, Patience of a Saint, and Simply Awful chapters). Coming soon!
I was disapounted with Teenage Mutant Turtles on the C64 because it was nothing like the arcade and I didnt like The Untouchables by Ocean.
Yeah that game was crap on all but maybe the NES , I love the Untouchables but its a hard game
The TMNT game was based on the first TMNT game on the NES, not the arcade game. I bought this one when I was a kid and thought it was OK. That is until at a certain point the game froze making it impossible to beat.
I had hundreds of games, most of those mentioned here... But only paid for one... Nz story...
The red cartridge add on was worth its weight in gold, allowed seemless easy copying and cracked all pass codes.
Hmmm....what is surprising is Karnov, Guerilla War, Double Dragon and Vigilante all looked/played like pure garbage. All four games looked phenomenal and played well on the Nes/Master System. I'm also wondering if this was a budget thing? Were these games bad because the publishers went super cheap?
I'm guessing that I am dead on the money, and here's why I say this... you show the prices for these games as 12.99 pounds. That's ridiculously cheap compared to what we paid for games. Budget titles started at $29.96, with full priced ones hitting between $49.96 to $69.96 American. I got my Nes and Master System in 1986, so I was definitely gaming during this time. Cool video.
Addendum- Holy sh*t is that scaling on the C64 (Line of Fire)?! No way! The game might be terrible but that effect is eye-opening for the time. Wow.
Yea you're right, in the old days you brought that game with the cool box art, it sucked and you were stuck playing it. I remember my C64, not sure I ever bought a game. I had a buttload of floppys with all sorts of pirated or bootleged games, random programs and other weird crap. Everyone just copied them than passed them around
Same here, I had a foreign mate with a add on cartridge that allowed copying of all games and access pass codes for extras.... He had friends overseas and we shared hundreds of games for the cost of the floppy disks.
Too bad Double Dragon was so bad, because the title music was BANGIN.
Back in the day I thought that "Titus" was French for "$hite"
I never had a C64 but highlander at no 2 reminded me of Barbarian. I'm not sure about the C64 version but the latter was a decent game on the ZX
Smash a Rock in Red Heat? Did you never see the film you were gripping a red hot piece of coal!!
Part of me feels glad that I couldn't afford them at the time
Can't agree more, infamous games...
Xybots on the C64 was unforgivably bad
I had Red Heat, Knight Rider and Big Trouble... and man, were they bad! We should've been paid for playing them! Fortunately back then, I had them for free so no regrets.
anything thats free is ok tbh